Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Vision-Language Foundation Models

Waymo; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 251,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary annual bonus

Equity incentive plan

Generous Company benefits program

Job summary

Waymo, a leader in autonomous driving technology, seeks a senior leader to drive large-scale multimodal model development. You will guide pre-training, data curation, and extensive post-training improvements to enhance reasoning and safety.

Your role includes architecting scalable training pipelines and mentoring engineers across ML Infra, Perception, and AI Foundations teams. You will shape long-term roadmaps, influence architecture, and push the boundaries of foundation models to support Waymo

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in CS/AI/ML or related field.
• 8+ years designing and scaling deep learning models.
• 3+ years focused on LLMs or VLMs.
• Experience with foundation models from pre-training to post-training.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals for scalable ML systems.

Responsibilities

• Drive pre-training & data strategies for multimodal models.
• Lead post-training & RLHF/RLAIF pipelines to improve reasoning.
• Architect scalable inference and evaluation for Gemini-class models.
• Define training recipes and scaling laws for large clusters.
• Lead cross-functional AI strategy across multiple teams.
• Provide staff-level technical leadership and mentorship.

Skills

LLM training

VLM training

Large-scale training

Python

PyTorch

JAX

Distributed training

Leadership

Education

Master’s degree in Computer Science/AI/ML

PhD preferred

Tools

Python

PyTorch

JAX

Megatron

FSDP

Job description

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver-The World’s Most Experienced Driver-to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

The Team & Mission

In the Oracle Perception team, our mission is to build the ultimate cognitive engine for autonomous driving. We are pioneering the use of large multimodal foundation models (e.g., Gemini) to build a powerful offboard reasoning and data flywheel system. We are moving beyond traditional perception to true scene understanding and driving actions-building offboard models that can comprehend complex driving problems, predict object/scene dynamics, and deduce driving paths with logical rationale.

You Will

• Drive Pre-training & Domain Adaptation: Lead the technical strategy for curating and constructing massive-scale, high-quality multimodal pre-training datasets. Define data mixture strategies to instill deep, Waymo-specific driving intuition and physics-grounded understanding into foundation models without catastrophic forgetting.
• Lead Post-Training & Reasoning Enhancement: Design and implement state-of-the-art fine-tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RLHF/RLAIF, DPO/GRPO/PPO) pipelines. Drastically improve the model’s instruction-following and complex reasoning capabilities (e.g., Chain-of-Thought, spatial-temporal reasoning, and driving rationale prediction).
• Pioneer the VLM Data Flywheel: Architect the highly scalable inference and evaluation pipelines that leverage these trained Gemini-class models to autonomously source, sample, and autolabel critical edge cases, directly accelerating the onboard perception models.
• Define Training Recipes & Scaling Laws: Conduct rigorous ablation studies to optimize model architectures, token budgets, and loss functions. Establish best practices for scaling multimodal training efficiently on large GPU/TPU clusters.
• Drive Cross-Functional AI Strategy: Act as the principal technical visionary across ML Infra, Perception, Behavior, and AI Foundation teams. Drive consensus on the data flywheel architecture and embed VLM reasoning capabilities seamlessly into the broader autonomous vehicle stack.
• Provide Staff-Level Technical Leadership: Own the long-term technical roadmap for foundation model development. Mentor senior engineers, lead rigorous design reviews, and establish standard-setting engineering practices from advanced prototyping to production deployment.

You Have

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI, ML, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of hands-on experience designing, training, and scaling deep learning models, with at least 3+ years focused deeply on training Large Language Models (LLMs) or Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
• Proven expertise in the full lifecycle of Foundation Models: from pre-training data curation (interleaved formats, tokenization) and distributed training to advanced post-training techniques.
• Expert-level understanding of training infrastructure and distributed paradigms (e.g., FSDP, Megatron, JAX/Pax) required for training massive models reliably.
• Expert-level software engineering fundamentals using Python, PyTorch, or JAX, with a track record of building reliable, highly scalable ML systems.
• Proven ability to operate with high ambiguity, define technical roadmaps, and drive complex, multi-quarter technical initiatives across multiple teams in a fast-paced environment.

We Prefer

• PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field.
• Strong publication record in top-tier AI venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR) focusing on foundation models, large-scale training, reinforcement learning, or reasoning.
• Deep experience with advanced Reinforcement Learning paradigms applied to language or vision tasks (focusing on improving System 2 thinking, logical deduction, and model alignment).
• Demonstrated experience in Data Engineering for Foundation Models at the scale of billions/trillions of tokens (e.g., deduplication, quality filtering, synthetic data generation).
• Familiarity with the systemic challenges of multimodal perception in robotics or autonomous driving (e.g., 3D scene understanding, trajectory prediction).
• A proven track record of Staff-level impact: influencing product direction, pioneering zero-to-one ML architectures, and multiplying team efficiency through technical leadership.

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is listed below. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process.

Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.

Salary Range

$251,000 — $310,000 USD